With profound and sincere apologies to Bruno, some people distinguish these two items, so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to marshall the arguments in one place, and give them simple names as per the objections to the Chinese Room I seem to recall seeing in one of DRH's books - "The Systems Reply" and so on.
So, why do some folks consider that "comp1" doesn't lead to "comp2" ? 1. "Arithmetical Realism is wrong" - the view that maths is something we made up. This might be true, but imho it has (so far) failed to convincingly explain away that pesky "unreasonable effectiveness". 2. "Pronouns" - only one person takes this seriously, and has been unable to convince anyone else (so far) but in theory there might be something wrong with using pronouns when talking about matter duplication (or AI programme duplication, or MWI experimenter duplication...) 3. "Everything in the light cone" - the view that consciousness is necessarily an open system, of which any description must take into account all past influences that may impinge on it. This is more interesting and persuasive than the first two, imho, but personally I don't think it's relevant, since if one is going to make a recording of a series of conscious states one can (in principle) isolate the brain from the outside world by making a "cut" where signals from the world turn to nerve impulses. One then has to "merely" record everything at that interface, and all the computations going on in the brain in response to that input. 4. The "Necessity of couterfactuals" - the view that any conscious being needs to be able to handle counterfactuals. This is true in real life, of course, but perhaps not if one is trying to create a recording of a conscious state. Maudlin goes into this in his "Olimpia and Klara" thought experiment, in which he constructs a Library of Babel's worth of completely unnecessary machinery to handle the counterfactuals, then refrains from actually using it. Istm that this applies to the MGA as well - there is no actual necessity to deal with cases that don't arise when one is repeatedly running the same deterministic computer programme, hence this ability isn't needed when replaying a recording of consciousness. 5. The "Argument from incredulity" - the whole idea is preposterous, so there simply must be something wrong somewhere! This is yet to be proven for all of modern science, most of which has been subjected to it at some point. And, for completeness... 6. The "pee-pee" argument, which makes fun of the terminology and insults the ideas without making any constructive points. I will lump into this arguments that because we don't have matter duplicators the whole thing fails, and similar ideas. I think we can dismiss these without further ado. For convenience, and because I know we like making up our own terminology, I have given these all handy abbreviations, namely ARW, PN, ELC, NOC, INC and TPPA. Is there anything I've missed? -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
